UK Budget 1909

Agitation for land reform culminated in Lloyd George submitting a budget to the House of Commons in 1909. The budget called for a nationwide valuation of land, the first step leading to a shift in the tax base. Some 5000 land valuers were put to work to do this. The tax rate proposed was to be just 0.2% on the land’s market value. In addition there was to be a 20% charge on all increases in land value. Plenty of discussion and often vehement argument and vitriol went on prior to this. Churchill wrote that practically the whole of the Commons session for that term was devoted to the budget. “The most arduous session on record,” he called it. “Debate went for over seventy parliamentary days and nights; there were 554 divisions upon specific points of principle and difference.” Opponents had some success in watering down the bill, as it passed through the commons. And even though some would say the final bill was riddled with exemptions and other complications, the bill still proved too much for the House of Lords. After lengthy debate, the (Land) Lords took the unprecedented step of denying, (by veto), the passage of the budget bill. A constitutional crises arose. Churchill had this to say of their actions; “The House of lords, in rejecting the Budget which provides for the national expenditure of the year, are refusing, for the first time since the Rebellion, aids and supplies to the crown, and by that fact, and by their intrusion upon finance they commit an act of violence against the British constitution. There is no precedent of any kind for the rejection of a budget bill by the House of Lords in all the long annals of the British Parliament, or before that, in the still more venerable annals of the English Parliament” Rumour has it that in 1909, the Lords car park was, for the very first time, not big enough. A newly elected House of Commons set about ensuring that the Lords would no longer have the powers of veto. This new bill only passed the House of Lords after the King threatened to create as many peers as were necessary to ensure it did pass. As for the land valuation and various land taxes, their implementation was deliberately delayed until the eve of the first world war. With the Nation’s attention now focused in this direction, the valuations were shelved, then later killed off with the return of a conservative government after the war.